Re: scanning help

>I have:
>MS Image Composer v1.5
>Mustek 1200sp flatbed scanner
>Questions:
>I want to be able to scan color 35mm pictures so
>that I can use them on my web site,what is the
>best of the above software to use?

I use MIC 1.5 with the Eye Candy and Kai's Power Tools plug-ins. Together,
they're great! MIC allows you to open your scanner software right from the
File menu (as long as your software is Twain compliant).

>The developed pics are 4"x6" and I would like to
>have them no wider than 300 pixels for my web
>page,should I scan at a high 300dpi and re-size?

I wouldn't. I would just scan them for the "screen" which is 75 dpi. This is
an easy area for confusion because when it comes to *printers*, dpi relates
to quality. Not so in  scanner nomenclature. DPI relates to physical size in
relation to your monitor. I'll briefly explain.

Say you have a 300 pixel wide image. If you view that image on a 640x480
display, it's going to take up about 1/2 the width of the screen. But if you
were to view that same image on a 1280x1000 display, it would only take up
1/4 of the screen. If you scan an image at 300 dpi, it's going to be huge on
the screen - though that's likely what you'll want if you're scanning for
*print* work. If you scan the image at 75 dpi, it will fit just fine on a
computer monitor.

It seems nobody knows exactly who came up with the 75 dpi standard, but it
does seem to size things well for web work.

There's an excellent website about this entire subject at:
http://www.cyberramp.net/~fulton/brev.html

>or should I start out with a smaller developed
>pic,scan at 300dpi and then re-size?

I've seen many claim that you get better results that way, but I've done
many, many side-by-side comparisons and I don't see any difference. In fact,
if you scan the image at too large a dpi, say 600, and then scale down, it
actually makes the image worse.

To resize an image, however, click the Arrange icon => in the Width or
Height box, type in your desired pixel size.

>Some of the pics have shadows(from trees) so I
>will have to "lighten"them up also.

MIC makes this easy. Click the Color Tuning icon => Dynamic Range tab =>
move the right vertical bar to the left and experiment. Piece of cake.

What I've found with shadows, however, is that when I lighten up an image to
bring the dark areas up, the lighter areas are then too bright. So what I do
instead, is first duplicate the image (Ctrl + D) and then lighten it so that
the dark areas look acceptable. Then I send that image to the back (right
click => Send to Back), center both images, select the top original image
and then erase the dark areas of the original so that the lighter image
below shows through. Then I select both images and flatten them (Ctrl + F).

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Demitrius >I<
------------------------------------------------A. Demitrius Lopez
       W  E  B  S  I  T  E     D  E  V  E  L  O  P  E  R
             http://members.aol.com/mrdemitri/
------------------------------------>I<------------------------------------

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